“My very choice is sufficient proof that I have preferred Julien to all the advantages which society offered to the daughter of the marquis de la Mole. Such pleasures, based as they are on prestige and petty vanity mean nothing to me. It is now nearly six weeks since I have lived separated from my husband. That is sufficient to manifest my respect for yourself. Before next Thursday I shall leave the paternal house. Your acts of kindness have enriched us. No one knows my secret except the venerable abbé Pirard. I shall go to him: he will marry us, and an hour after the ceremony we shall be on the road to Languedoc, and we will never appear again in Paris except by your instructions. But what cuts me to the quick is that all this will provide the subject matter for piquant anecdotes against me and against yourself. May not the epigrams of a foolish public compel our excellent Norbert to pick a quarrel with Julien, under such circumstances I know I should have no control over him. We should discover in his soul the mark of the rebel plebian. Oh father, I entreat you on my knees, come and be present at my marriage in M. Pirard’s church next Thursday. It will blunt the sting of malignant scandal and will guarantee the life’s happiness of your only daughter, and of that of my husband, etc., etc.”
This letter threw the marquis’s soul into a strange embarrassment. He must at last take a definite line. All his little habits: all his vulgar friends had lost their influence.
In these strange circumstances the great lines of his character, which had been formed by the events of his youth, reassumed all their original force. The misfortunes of the emigration had made him into an imaginative man. After having enjoyed for two years an immense fortune and all the distinctions of the court, 1790 had flung him into the awful miseries of the emigration. This hard schooling had changed the character of a spirit of twenty-two. In essence, he was not so much dominated by his present riches as encamped in their midst. But that very imagination which had preserved his soul from the taint of avarice, had made him a victim of a mad passion for seeing his daughter decorated by a fine title.
During the six weeks which had just elapsed, the marquis had felt at times impelled by a caprice for making Julien rich. He considered poverty mean, humiliating for himself, M. de la Mole, and impossible in his daughter’s husband; he was ready to lavish money. On the next day his imagination would go off on another tack, and he would think that Julien would read between the lines of this financial generosity, change his name, exile himself to America, and write to Mathilde that he was dead for her. M. de la Mole imagined this letter written, and went so far as to follow its effect on his daughter’s character.
The day when he was awakened from these highly youthful dreams by Mathilde’s actual letter after he had been thinking for along time of killing Julien or securing his disappearance he was dreaming of building up a brilliant position for him. He would make him take the name of one of his estates, and why should he not make him inherit a peerage? His father-in-law, M. the duke de Chaulnes, had, since the death of his own son in Spain, frequently spoken to him about his desire to transmit his title to Norbert....
“One cannot help owning that Julien has a singular aptitude for affairs, had boldness, and is possibly even brilliant,” said the marquis to himself ... “but I detect at the root of his character a certain element which alarms me. He produces the same impression upon everyone, consequently there must be something real in it,” and the more difficult this reality was to seize hold of, the more it alarmed the imaginative mind of the old marquis.
“My daughter expressed the same point very neatly the other day (in a suppressed letter).
“Julien has not joined any salon or any côterie. He has nothing to support himself against me, and has absolutely no resource if I abandon him. Now is that ignorance of the actual state of society? I have said to him two or three times, the only real and profitable candidature is the candidature of the salons.
“No, he has not the adroit, cunning genius of an attorney who never loses a minute or an opportunity. He is very far from being a character like Louis XL. On the other hand, I have seen him quote the most ungenerous maxims ... it is beyond me. Can it be that he simply repeats these maxims in order to use them as a dam against his passions?
“However, one thing comes to the surface; he cannot bear contempt, that’s my hold on him.